Ed Kyle schrieb:

Heads up Florida! He has a point about how distruptive
a launch failure could be in terms of evacuations, etc.

I think nowadays, where people have some real problems to worry about,
it is much harder to get them to panic over a non-issue like that.

But maybe in the long term it would be a good idea to launch
controversial missions from a remote location like kwajalein. It would
certainly make protesting much harder, and since in case of a launch
accident the payload would almost certainly land in the water, you
could just recover and reuse the RTG.

The funny thing about this is that launching a cold nuclear reactor
would actually be even safer than launching a hot RTG. But the
anti-nuclear crowd would go totally berserk if somebody were to launch
a reactor into space. Just shows how irrational these folks are.

The alternatives to using RTGs are using cold-launched nuclear reactors
or completely stopping exploration of the outer solar system. Since the
first option would be even more controversial than RTGs, we would just
have to stop missions to the outer solar system. But I guess that would
be OK for the anti-nuclear crowd. They would probably prefer it if the
money that goes to NASA would go to the UN to "heal the world".

The best thing is to just ignore them.